Animated Short Animatic

Once we had our concept drawings and research done, we decided we should storyboard how we'd imagine the plot progressing. After a long discussion about the story between us and along with several final year students, we had lots of ideas flowing. Alec had given us guidance and his opinion on our idea also. With that in mind, we agreed to do a storyboard each that evening based on how each of us would imagine the story going. The idea being that we'd arrive the next day and compare ideas to see which we like. Below is my version of the story. 

Since we had discussed the story in great detail the day before, we all had pretty much the same idea for the intro and mid section. Differences only arose in the ending. In my ending, a bee attempts to pop the balloon, however fails to do so after a suspense filled scene. Nevertheless, he ends up being torn to shreds by an airplane anyway. Although this builds suspense, we felt that having an RC drone attack the balloon would be more original.

After finalising the story, we spent the next week working on the animatic. Mateja would draw the main key frames and I'd draw the inbetween frames, while Shannon worked on the backgrounds and Caitlin on the sound and editing. This worked really well and was an efficient way of getting things done quickly. We had learned to maintain a consistent style throughout the animatic from the first semester.

Original Animatic

The presentation went well and everyone seemed to enjoy our story/idea. Alec and Mike had suggested we shorten the beginning, however. This was a good point as maybe there was too much dead air at the start, and we could start it off quickly instead. They also suggested we introduce the drone at the beginning as a means of foreshadowing - so that he doesn't just show up randomly at the end.

Mike also proposed that instead of the camera flying down from the sky to introduce the balloons, it could simply pan to the left/right to reveal them. He suggested that if the camera were to be separated from the balloons by a small wall at all times, that it would symbolise a divide between the audience and the characters and simultaneously represent a sense of confinement. This made complete sense to us and sounded good, however, once we began to implement it onto paper, some continuity problems arose regarding positioning and breaking the 18-degree rule. Instead, we simply adjusted our into shot. We also added in a few more minor fixes in the updated version.

Updated Animatic